Slashdot Mirror
EU Parliament Demands Fresh Start for Patent Directive
ravenII writes "Members of the European Parliament from countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden have asked for the software patent directive to be redone from scratch, according to a report on Monday."
Start from scratch! The U.S. patent system is screwed up beyond belief. There is nothing I can say here that hasn't already been said before. Also we need to make it so that no corporations can own patents. Only individuals or groups of individuals should own patents. An entire corporation is too big and too financially strong of an entity to own a patent.
The de jure situation in the U.S.: If someone were to submit a patent application for "Hamlet rendered in ink on paper", the patent could not be rejected only on the grounds of the literature not being statutory material for a patent (test 1). Because the ink and paper are statutory, you have to move on to tests 2 and 3, novelty and non-obviousness. Neither the ink nor the paper is novel. Nor are the ink, paper and literature combined into a whole in a novel way. Novelty in the literature doesn't count because it's not statutory. The patent is invalid based on non-novelty. This is the Diehr test, and software that essentially patents an algorithm for a general-purpose digital computer is invalid under this test.
The de facto situation in the U.S.: The USPTO gets paid according to how many applications they accept, so they are going to read the law in such a way as to be able to accept as many applications as possible. That means software patents generally get granted, and the burden of proof is on the victim to show that the patent should have been rejected.
"Copyrights" should really have been called something like "distribution and performance rights", but back in the day, you enforced this by limiting the ability to copy. Now there are no physical barriers to copying so the word is odd. What "copyrights" are intended to do is this: make sure that the people who originate a work of art are the only ones with the right to obtain compensation for the distribution of that art. I'm not even sure how 'performance' fits in, because there are some folks that maybe wrote a song but couldn't sing, but other folks will go see someone else who sings it better - so are the people paying for the song or the performance of the song? It's not clear what the correct distinction should be.
Patents were slightly different - they were originally around so that the garage inventor would be protected from the giant corporation (at least, I hope that's the original intent!). Think about it: if you're a big corporation, you don't need to be "protected" from people stealing your idea because you can build and market it. If you're a small operation, you have to work hard to get resources to develop. The patent protected that period of time so that a rich entity didn't come along and beat you to market using your idea. Now only big entities can easily get patents, and they don't so much use them to be first to market but to keep others out of the market. The intent of a patent should be "development protection" rather than "market protection" (we all know that artificial barriers in the market are inherently Bad). Giant companies hardly need development protection, and the only reason they want "market protection" is to cover their incompetencies (yes, I know the truth is hard to swallow) at adapting to changing markets.
So, my proposals to revamp the whole system would be to come up with a new system of "distribution rights", "performance rights", and "development protection" with appropriate, thoughtful definitions for each of those (to distinguish what customers want as in the example of the writer and singer that I gave above). What we need to keep in mind is that the people that deserve the "protection" from these laws is not the big businesses (publishers, manufacturers, etc.) but the people that generate the thigns of value - the artists, the engineers, the performers. After all, you will always have artists and engineers independently of the means of getting their ideas out to the masses; the current trend in "intellectual property" seems to miss this.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Remember, the "BIG" in "BIG Corporations" is silent. Welcome to Slashdot.
"Now if only we (as in we, the people) could get more direct say in EU minister appointments"
You do. They're the same ministers that you vote into your own countries government.
The same ones who commonly use "the EU" as a scapegoat for what they themselves push through in the council of ministers.
The 'local powers', in this case, are not on the side of the voters.
Who needs a prototype? What he heck are you talking about anyway?
From what 'Ms. Lohan' said, this is the proposal: If you can draw a plan, that's concrete, take a patent on the design. What we don't want to see is someone patenting the idea of squirting water into the air from a fish tank and recovering it to oxygenate the tank. Make a specific device and patent that. What we have in software is currently parallel to patenting the design of a 'car' instead of, say a 'honda civic'. When you write a software car, people should compete with that specific car, not the concept of car! I don't care if you made the first one either.
People are finally getting it: small and medium-sized businesses won't be able to produce software products and services if the patent directive is initiated. IBM holds 40,000 patents, any one of which can be used against a small company, essentially bankrupting them. Microsoft is in a similar position. Amazing that Europeans are seeing the light.
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
If you have a great and revolutionary product that might infringe on someone elses code - you just need to prove that yours is different OR get sued.
What enforces the OR? Nothing but the high moral character of the potential plaintiff. That is to say nothing at all. You will need to prove that yours is different, but you'll have to do that in court while your capital bleeds away in legal fees. Keep in mind, the plaintiff doesn't have to prove their case to win, they just have to drag the case out until you can't afford to defend yourself anymore.
Your only hope is to make sure that the plaintiff/extortionist can buy you off a lot cheaper than they can plow you into the ground.
I would like to have the legal right to invent and not have my stuff stolen by same lame ass who is nothing more then a hack and then I can't touch him cause some douchebag decided patents shouldn't apply to software.
Reading this I wonder wether you actually have ever programmed over a couple lines, or even ever invented anything worth patenting. Give another 10.000 people the same problem, and someone is bound to come up with the same idea you had - or better. And if you have a patent on a worse version of their idea, they won't be able to patent it, due to some douchbag w/o the amount of brain required to finish an idea.
As an example, there's one form of Maglev devices which is far better than what we have running, that has never seen production, because the owners of the patent charge too much for it. Even though they never did anything useful with it, noone can build something even similar - by releasing their patent they infact "poluted" the world by locking in an idea.
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
That's not true. You can sue him just because you feel like it. You can win if his lawyer thinks there's some possibility a court might decide that your patent claims cover his software, or if he thinks the legal costs wouldn't be worth it.
You can probably win more damages if you can prove he was aware of your patent, but by no means does he need to steal your code, or even be aware of its existence, for you to sue him.
What part of 'No' don't they understand? The "EU Patent" lobby lost. Go solve some more pressing issues instead of trying to protect big business.
Second, people have extended the meaning of the word "derivative work" a bit too far - some take it to mean that "I patented this bolt. If you use my bolt, whatever you use it in is a derivative work," which is a bit obtuse (I paid for the bolt, you got your compensation already!). Patents were in place to protect a particular means of performing some operation, not the operation itself! This doesn't even being to touch on the realm of even when a patent does address a means and not an end and that means is absurd (like the laser-pointer-feline-activity-inducer).
Standards are a different issue entirely; if you look at most standards today they are "pay to enter the club" type things (look at ANSI, ISO, SAE, etc.) Standards are basically arbitrary agreements on interfaces and shouldn't be protected at all in my book. (Do we have to pay to know what a meter is? A kilogram?) If it's protected, it's not a "standard" - it's an access card and a tool to expand elitism. While you can argue about which "interfaces" should be standards and which aren't, I think we agree that "closed" interfaces are a hindrance rather than a help to innovation.
Forcing others to reinvent the wheel is actually also a good way to promote innovation - assuming you aren't really trying to reinvent the wheel but "find another way to perform operation Q". Sometimes things are natural building blocks - like basic mechanics, mathematics, and the like and reinventing things like calculus or how to make steel or coordinate transforms are better left shared than protected. But the FAT filesystem? Why does that need protection when there are millions of ways to store data on a disk? The only reason to patent something like that is to force people to your method and hinder alternatives - or at least hinder interfacing with your things that use that "interface".
The trouble, I guess, is determining at what point people are "making money off your invention" and when they are merely using your invention as a starting point for something else. For instance, cars use lots of steel, so technically they "make money off steel", but cars are not steel.
I know I'm rambling a bit, but mostly it's because I'm really trying to contribute (albeit in a very limited and uncoordinated fashion) to the intellectual-property-reform movement. (You can also ask me about my recent foray into musings on property rights and property taxes in general).
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
True. The difference between a world with ideas/software patentable and a patent-free world is only this: in the case of the former, your idea is already stolen before you even come up with it.
To put it differently: you come up with an idea you have no means to implement at the moment. Should you be granted a patent for your idea? Because if you should, than I have lots of ideas, which, if I had the means, I would patent asap. Are these great ideas? Maybe some of them... Do I have to prove that they are? (proof is in the pudding - or rather, the implementation!). I just have to wait until someone builds a gadget that is based on my ideas (more or less) and then... sue! Yes, that would be great.
Actually, as I said, I don't have the money to patent my ideas. But [insert_name_of_random_corporation_here] has. And what these usually do is that they patent ideas as fast as they can. It doesn't matter if these ideas are great or not. If you patent 1000 ideas each year (I use ideas here in a very broad sense) there is a good chance that at least a few of them would be great ideas. And because they are great ideas, it is very likely that someone else would think about it, who instead of using the patent system as a lottery (and spend his/her money in patenting the idea), would build the thing. And because someone, who didn't bother to try to implement it patented it first, this inventor (of not just great ideas) would find himself in the court room.
Of course, this is just an example - a little bit exaggerated (or is it? we have seen these things before) but still it shows quite nicely how easily a patent system could be abused. And it WILL be abused, because there is no way you can filter all the patents that are applied for in the patent office. Also, if you are so brilliant as to think up the idea of The SuperGadget - you will have to work to get it built/implemented. If you come up with an idea of something that there is no way you can implement, than you are not that brilliant.
My problem is with people who do not invent stuff yet get to patent it.
My problem with software patents is non-triviality - and the fact that ideas are usually building blocks, not final structures. If you put monetary barriers in the building blocks, then you are reducing the possibilities of society as a whole to produce new ideas and new technologies.
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
why not prove to the patent office that your process is different.
In other words, feed the system more by having someone write the patent and file it and adding yet another patent to the pile?
My preferred solution is to require:
1) software patents that expire within the usual software life cycle (of about 4-8 years)
2) require some form of structured pseudocode that clearly describes the process being claimed
3) Similar to a Design patent, only one process can be claimed per patent, none of this "The system in 1, 3 and 8343 whereby the operator is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwitch while entering data with his/her left pinky" that plagues the system now.
4) Titles and abstracts will be written by the reviewer to accurately describe what is being patented, NOT the misleading gibberish and shoutoutz that show up in the patents these days.
5) 2+4 require more qualified personnel as you say.
6) In the absense of 3, date each claim individually to prevent submarine patents (real ones, not the "zomg you sued us from nowhere" we hear about often here) where people claim a flagrantly invalid process just to get a starting date, and then bounce the patent against the patent office repeatedly while adding new (sometimes their own, often other peoples') innovations to the claims, resulting in a patent that may expire sooner, but for which all prior art must beat the original filing deadline, even if it had been in use a whole year before the actual claim had been added.
7) Better beats older. If you invent a sort process that sorts in O(n log (n/2)), and patent it, and I read the patent and see that by changing a line in your pseudocode it becomes O(n), I win. People who wish to use my O(n) patent come to me for licensing, even though your patent may have been heavily used. People who only want to use O(n log (n/2)) can go to you for your silly patent, but you have no right to challenge mine for one-upping you.
Of course, eliminating the "business method" patent that software uses now would be the far superior model. Businesses ran fine for over 200 years (Ending in 1998 with the State Street case) here in the US without patenting their "methods", and even longer in Europe.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.